At our venture capital firm, Cue Ball, we are pretty maniacal about understanding customers. We encourage our portfolio company CEOs to dive deep — very deep — and learn about their customers along every possible dimension. My Partner, Dick Harrington, and developed a customer-driven approach and capability set that we put in place at Thomson which ultimately was a key driver of the company’s transformation into a global media and information powerhouse. We wrote about this in a 2008 HBR article, Transforming Strategy One Customer at a Time.